Climbing the ranks: ASRock’s Z77E-ITX Mini-ITX motherboard reviewed

Say hello to the not-so-new number three.

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When you think of the top three retail motherboard makers, Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI probably come to mind. Those firms dominated the market for ages. Asus and Gigabyte still have the top two spots sewn up, but MSI is no longer on the podium. Starting as early as 2010, ASRock has been shipping more retail boards than the former number three. ASRock may crank out fewer than half as many mobos as Asus and Gigabyte, but its lead over MSI appears to be growing.

The rise of ASRock is particularly notable because the firm started out as an Asus subsidiary focusing on low-end products. ASRock was eventually spun off as part of Pegatron, an independent design and manufacturing company that makes a wide range of computing hardware. With independence came the freedom to expand beyond the realm of budget boards and into enthusiast territory.

One of ASRock's most intriguing enthusiast boards is the Z77E-ITX, a Mini-ITX offering that combines Intel's top-of-the-line Ivy Bridge platform with loads of features at a competitive price. We're on a bit of a Mini-ITX kick, having recently reviewed comparable Z77 boards from Asus and Zotac. Now, it's ASRock's turn under the magnifying glass.

The Z77E-ITX looks a lot like a high-end ATX board downsized to Mini-ITX dimensions. At the center is an LGA1155 socket capable of accepting the latest Ivy Bridge processors. The socket connects to a Z77 Express platform hub responsible for much of the board's integrated I/O in addition to a handful of key features.

Like some other Ivy chipsets, the Z77 supports SSD caching via Intel's Smart Response Technology and GPU virtualization via Lucid's Virtu software. What really sets this platform hub apart from its 7-series peers is robust overclocking support. The Z77 provides unfettered access to the CPU and memory multipliers on K-series processors, allowing folks to hot-clock their systems with little effort.

Overclocking typically requires aftermarket cooling, and finding something suitable for a Mini-ITX build can be especially challenging. The form factor's tiny 6.7" x 6.7" footprint leaves little space between the socket and other onboard components. Also, Mini-ITX enclosures tend to have less internal volume than a shoebox. Since we can't test compatibility with every hardware combination, we've taken a few key measurements to illustrate where the socket sits relative to other onboard components.

The socket is closer to the PCI Express x16 slot than on any other Mini-ITX Z77 board we've measured. ASRock puts the expansion slot right on the edge of the socket region, leaving no room for larger coolers that branch out in that direction. The DIMM slots are also rather close to the socket, but that's true for all the Z77 boards we've tested. Using standard-height memory modules should avoid any potential clearance conflicts there.

Most of the Z77E-ITX's onboard components stay close to the surface. The only exceptions are the VRM heatsink and vertical battery mount that sit to the left of the socket. At 25 and 22 mm tall, respectively, these parts are short enough to steer clear of typical aftermarket heatsinks.

Although most of the Z77E-ITX's expansion capacity is found topside, the board's underbelly hides an mSATA slot perfect for a mini SSD. This location isn't the most convenient for quick upgrades, but there's only so much real estate on the other side of the board. I do worry about mSATA SSDs overheating, though. Enclosures rarely ventilate the underside of the motherboard.

On the business side of the board, the mSATA slot is complemented by four Serial ATA ports. Note how the ports are oriented; they're keyed so the locking tab on SATA connectors is always on the outside and easily accessible. Most boards stack SATA ports without changing their orientation, which means some locking tabs are impossible to reach without removing adjacent cables. ASRock has found a simple solution to what can be an annoying quirk.

The picture above gives us a nice view of the Mini PCIe wireless card, which offers 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity but no Bluetooth support. We can also see onboard headers for two USB 3.0 ports and four USB 2.0 ones. The internal USB 3.0 ports stem from the Z77 Express platform hub, and there are four more in the rear cluster. Half of those rear ports come from the Intel chip, while the remainder are supplied by an auxiliary ASMedia controller.

There's a little bit of everything in the rear cluster, including a trio of digital display outputs reserved for Ivy's integrated graphics. The clear CMOS button is a nice addition, allowing the firmware settings to be reset without popping open the case. If you've ever poked around inside a fully loaded Mini-ITX enclosure, you'll appreciate how difficult it can be to reach the onboard jumper that performs the same task.

Integrated audio is critically important for Mini-ITX systems, which have insufficient expansion capacity to run discrete sound and graphics cards side by side. The Z77E-ITX's implementation isn't too bad. There are enough analog jacks to avoid port sharing, and an S/PDIF output provides pristine digital output. Digital audio can be piped through the HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, too, but there are some limitations. Unless you're watching a movie or other content with a pre-encoded multichannel track, digital output is limited to two-channel stereo. To get surround sound in games and other real-time applications, you'll need to use the analog jacks.

The Realtek drivers that govern the integrated audio do support surround sound virtualization for stereo playback. ASRock also throws in some THX software that presumably does something useful if you cough up $25 for the full version. The free release does little beyond adjusting the system volume, though.

Apart from a VGA adapter for the DVI output, the Z77E-ITX is short on bundled extras. The Wi-Fi antenna is worth mentioning, if only because it's a rather beefy specimen. The antenna isn't the most attractive accessory, and it certainly doesn't match the board's bling-on-black aesthetic. However, the receiver does sit at the end of about 32" of wiring. You should have no problem positioning the antenna for optimal signal strength.

39 Reader Comments

You couldn't get me to touch an ASRock board with a 100 foot pole again. Every single one of these things I've touched has been sub-par performance in one way or another. The specs look great on paper, but IRL, they stink.

I sincerely hope they might be getting better, but you still can't convince me to buy one. Ever.

You couldn't get me to touch an ASRock board with a 100 foot pole again. Every single one of these things I've touched has been sub-par performance in one way or another. The specs look great on paper, but IRL, they stink.

I sincerely hope they might be getting better, but you still can't convince me to buy one. Ever.

Whens the last time you bought one?

I've had nightmare experiences with MSI and will never touch them again. I used to buy only Gigabyte but they went downhill. I decided to try ASRock and have been incredibly happy with my board.

They semi recently split from ASUS and are no longer the ASUS budget offshoot, so if you bought one before that you might want to try again.

Some of my best memories of PC building were centered around the asrock 939 board that featured a daughterboard to upgrade to AM2 processors down the line. It was a wonderful hybrid board; IDE and SATA, PCI Express and AGP, 939 and AM2, and DDR and DDR2. They always seemed to be the more innovative brand in the budget line, and that led to their boards being some of the ones I held onto the longest.

I'm confused about the conclusion. No BT is a complaint? It's a mini-PCIE wifi card, so just pop in something like the Intel 6230 BT+WiFi combo card, and away you go.

For a hardware enthusiast site to claim that's an issue is...confounding.

I think the issue is that getting a new card adds $10-15 to the price of the board while asrock could likely have implemented bluetooth for <$2.00

Sure, but that still seems like a nit-picky thing. I mean, they talk about K series Ivy Bridge CPUs. These bad boys are NOT inexpensive, to the point where the $10 Centrino 6230 (or a $25 6235 with BT 4.0) is nearly a rounding error.

Plus, with it as a mini-PCIe option, you can always upgrade it to the next great wireless option with little to no fuss. Built on to the board (as many of these are lately, it would seem), forces obsolescence into the design.

Like I said, for a hardware enthusiast site to complain about modularity is just weird.

It's difficult to imagine such a teensy board powering a 'proper' gaming rig.

But, from the specs, it seems do-able. Put in a hefty video card, and this thing could scream. What would worry me, is the heat distribution.

You're paying for the small space that this thing uses; personally, I'm comfortable with my honking-huge desktop (Antec 300 case), if I got a new system, I'd get a decent sized motherboard and keep the existing case -- going for the mini makes limited sense if you're not space-limited!

Still it looks neat.

I think the Hackintosh idea is good, but the whole Hackintosh debacle is debatable -- it's so difficult to get a stable H'tosh going, it seems barely worth the effort of building your own 'unlicensed' Mac, when you could go out and get a real one and not have those niggles to worry about AND have official support for your device. Stability trumps pennies-saved-by-doing-it-all-yourself. An argument for another thread, I'm sure.

I actually had a decent board from them when they were still owned by Asus, was a socket A with a Barton 2500. Wait, I lied, it was crap. Died on me within a year, and before it went it had a suspicious event with a 9600xt video card that somehow actually caught fire, inches from my face no less.

Glad to see they aren't making crap anymore, although in my experience I can't say the same for Asus boards, or their customer service.

Some of my best memories of PC building were centered around the asrock 939 board that featured a daughterboard to upgrade to AM2 processors down the line. It was a wonderful hybrid board; IDE and SATA, PCI Express and AGP, 939 and AM2, and DDR and DDR2. They always seemed to be the more innovative brand in the budget line, and that led to their boards being some of the ones I held onto the longest.

This looks awesome.

Mm, I had the 939DUAL SATA2 and it was quite excellent. It even overclocked moderately well!

I can't remember which one it was, but one of their 1155 ITX boards had some power problems, which killed them. Should be fixed now though.

Don't plan to be putting together a new rig in this form factor any time soon, but in a year or two I might look at going down this route. The main concern I'm seeing is getting any decent liquid cooler into any ITX case, and if you're going to be shoving a K-series into a board like this, clearly you're going to be pushing it.

Still, a very interesting review that hammered home how much better the form factor has gotten lately.

Would be nice to know if these boards can boot linux. A lot of the new uefi motherboards do not and do not have any drivers for linux either. Let alone buggy uefi preventing linux booting.

I got this board a couple weeks ago to replace my old/dead one. Paired it with a 3570k. I use linux (mint 13) exclusively on this machine, for everything that's not games. Coming from an H55+i5-750, I replaced the board+cpu and booted linux, it detected everything fine.

Windows 7 was also surprisingly hassle-free, I just needed to install all the drivers, and uninstalled as much of the old drivers as I could.

You couldn't get me to touch an ASRock board with a 100 foot pole again. Every single one of these things I've touched has been sub-par performance in one way or another. The specs look great on paper, but IRL, they stink.

I sincerely hope they might be getting better, but you still can't convince me to buy one. Ever.

Whens the last time you bought one?

I've had nightmare experiences with MSI and will never touch them again. I used to buy only Gigabyte but they went downhill. I decided to try ASRock and have been incredibly happy with my board.

They semi recently split from ASUS and are no longer the ASUS budget offshoot, so if you bought one before that you might want to try again.

IMHO the budger nature of ASRock wasn't poorer quality, but that they used less mainstream/cheaper chipsets.

I only had one ASRock board, which used the SiS755 chipset, and it was on par with normal Asus in every other way than that.

Attention UB mfrs. See this? This is a cool, feature-packed product. The engineers paid a lot of attention to the design and figured out how to make something really cool. See this? Yes? Now go poach engineers, project managers, or whatever you have to do and build me a UB as cool as this.

I had similar experiences to the first poster with ASrock, really poor performance and other issues, but that was something like 8 years ago now and I haven't tried any of their recent offerings. MSI on the other hand I've always had great experience with (using one of their notebooks still right now as well), though my current rig uses a Gigabyte board because I couldn't find a decent MSI board (the UK market for computer components is pretty bad at times).

Would be nice to know if these boards can boot linux. A lot of the new uefi motherboards do not and do not have any drivers for linux either. Let alone buggy uefi preventing linux booting.

I don't have this board, however my file server uses an ASRock A75M-HVS. Out of the box it worked fine with Linux. After the 2.00 firmware update that supports Windows 8, Linux no longer boots. Just a dead black screen after grub hands off to the kernel. I sent an email to their tech support and they didn't even bother replying. I wouldn't recommend ASRock for Linux users.

What amazes me is that they'd goto of the trouble of making an enthusiast class Intel ITX board but not make one for AMD when AMD APU's are far better for gaming and more likely to attract enthusiasts looking at ITX. I mean what's the point out building a tiny ITX system if you have to stick a graphic card in it for gaming which is what the Intel option needs, defeats the point in the first place!

I have an ASRock FM2A75M-ITX running a AMD 5800K in an Antec ISK300-150 case which is a great little media centre and 720p gaming system. However the integrated Radeon 7660D in the 5800K is severely bottle-necked by the RAM as can be seen by the up to 20% performance increase by going from 1866 to 2133 DDR3. This motherboard supposedly supports 2400 and 2600 DDR3 (OC) but the reality is if you set the RAM to 2133 or above in the BIOS the GPU clock is automatically dropped by half to only 400Mhz which totally kills the graphics performance! This is a real joke and clearly ASRock was not serious about the faster RAM support which is such a shame as being able to run the RAM at 2400+ would really unleash the integrated graphics. I did manage to get around this be using the 1866 memory divider and upping the PCIE clock to 115Mhz resulting in 2145 memory speed. Unfortunately the board isn't stable at higher speeds and there are no enthusiast class FM2 ITX boards available yet so I still can't see what a 5800K with 2400/2600+ memory is capable of.

I actually own this board and am using it as an HTPC. I have not had any problems and it has performed very well. My system has an I3 processor with an aftermarket cooler. The fan on the cooler did not fit in the case so I just left it off and I have not had any over heating issues, even with no fan. As the reviewer noted, there is no bluetooth, but this board will work with other Intel wireless cards which include bluetooth. I had some issues getting all of the drivers to work properly, but in the end it works great.

I picked this board over the Asus because that board does not have 7.1 analog audio out and the Zotac looked good but I did not know much of anything about Zotac. This board was easy to set up and works great. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a small HTPC board.

What amazes me is that they'd goto of the trouble of making an enthusiast class Intel ITX board but not make one for AMD when AMD APU's are far better for gaming

What makes you say that? It seems to me that AMDs offerings have an abundance of cores but lack in per-core performance, which isn't a good fit considering the state of parallel-processing support in current game engines.

Even without the memory bundle, the Z77E-ITX is a solid value. I'm even tempted to bust out our TR Recommended award, but it's difficult to give that strong of an endorsement when there are blue-screen-producing software bugs that need to be resolved. The Z77E-ITX will be easier to recommend once those issues are sorted.

So you review a piece of hardware but knock it for a software issue? What is this? Amateur Hour?

I just replaced a brand new Gigabyte board with an ASRock board, very happy with the change, nothing but troubles with the Gigabyte board and the support team didn't want to acknowledge the issue even though it has been semi confirmed by users on their boards.

Gigabyte served me well for years, I'll buy ASRock now until I get a bad one, bound to happen at some point.

What amazes me is that they'd goto of the trouble of making an enthusiast class Intel ITX board but not make one for AMD when AMD APU's are far better for gaming and more likely to attract enthusiasts looking at ITX. I mean what's the point out building a tiny ITX system if you have to stick a graphic card in it for gaming which is what the Intel option needs, defeats the point in the first place!

I think this point of view may be a bit out-dated, if not completely false; especially at the high-end. Sure, the onboard video for Atom-based or even first-generation Sandy Bridge processors was laughable compared to AMD's counterparts (I have a Mini ITX Athlon II system under my living room television because the Atom-based board it replaced couldn't keep up with 720p, let alone full 1080); but that hasn't been true for at least a year if not more.

The newest '4000' series graphics built into Intel's chips are on-par with, if not slightly more powerful, than anything AMD is offering. If you need better graphics than you can get built-in to a new Ivy Bridge CPU, you need a discreet graphics card; and you probably aren't looking at Mini ITX rigs.

Granted, it has been a few years since my last major component upgrade (two years ago was video card, this year was SSD), but I've never had trouble with MSI components. That may be changing over time, but I've never once had a problem with any MSI component. Even some twelve year year old ones we had sitting at work.

They may not be selling as many parts due to price, but has the quality suffered?

I've been a happy owner of a machine built around the Z77E-ITX and an i7 for about half a year now. Tiny, quiet, fast (the only thing I can hear in the case is the old laptop harddrive, if and when it spins up - and that with a stock intel cooler. Kudos!). Can't recommend it enough.

I guess Ars is less hardware-enthusiast than I suspected. Hardware sites have been all about ITX boards for a couple years now.

I picked up an Asrock E350M1 a few months ago to be the center of a car PC. Features were more than decent, and the price was a lot better than what Asus had at the time. Beyond that and another E350 from Sapphire, I've been nearly Asus-exclusive for quite a while. The Asrock's definitely nicer than the Sapphire (who are apparently wavering about whether they want to be back in the motherboard market or not.)

Boards like this are becoming more the norm - the manufacturers are recognizing that enthusiasts will buy the hardware if it has the features they want. In a lot of cases, full-fat ATX boards aren't necessary. I find it a little odd that people would turn a Z77 board into an HTPC (given that Z77 is the full-blown chipset aimed more at gamers and overclockers), but I like it when ITX boards do well. Gives me hope that the manufacturers will branch out into more AM3+ and FM2 boards. Last I checked, there wasn't an FM2 board to be found in ITX, and the selection in Micro-ATX was underwhelming at best.

What makes you say that? It seems to me that AMDs offerings have an abundance of cores but lack in per-core performance, which isn't a good fit considering the state of parallel-processing support in current game engines.

Intel CPUs may be faster but most games are not CPU limited and AMD processors are perfectly adequate for all except hardcore gamers. You get a far better gaming experience with an AMD A10 5800K than Intel's i7 3770K because of the stronger graphics performance. Gaming benefits far more from having a decent GPU and this is where the AMD's integrated graphics really shine even compared to Intel's latest integrated offerings.

Zeus wrote:

The newest '4000' series graphics built into Intel's chips are on-par with, if not slightly more powerful, than anything AMD is offering. If you need better graphics than you can get built-in to a new Ivy Bridge CPU, you need a discreet graphics card; and you probably aren't looking at Mini ITX rigs.

This is just blatantly wrong. See below link for a comparison of an A10 5800K vs a i7 3770K, Radeon 7660D is significantly faster than HD 4000. And this is a 5800K using stock 1866 RAM, you can increase performance significantly again by using 2133+.

So if you want to build a ITX PC that's decent for causal gaming AMD Trinity APU's are the better offering, to get better with Intel you need a discrete graphics card and then as Zeus said you're probably not looking at ITX anyway. A decent enthusiast FM2 ITX board would really unlock the potential of the Trinity APU's even further too. Also later this year AMD will release Richland based APU's featuring the GCN graphics architecture so the performance will increase again and these will supposedly be compatible with current FM2 boards.